Peek Inside the Fascinating World of Burglars, Those Masters of Cities

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Peek Inside the Fascinating World of Burglars, Those Masters of Cities

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Imagine breaking into your own home. How would you do it? Me, I would crawl onto the awning of my neighbor's patio, gingerly traverse the structure's sheet metal roof, and use friction from my hands to slide open the window to my second-story bathroom. Truth be told, I've resorted to this strategy more than once. It gets easier every time.

Infiltrating your own place might require different maneuvers, but they, too, would involve the creative misuse of architecture. For his latest book, Geoff Manaugh, founder of the popular architecture website BLDGBLOG, set out to learn more about the creative ways that burglars see the world—to understand, he writes, "what a town, a street, a neighborhood, looks like through their eyes, as spaces of seemingly endless possibility."

The fruit of Manaugh's investigation is *A Burglar's Guide to the City, *a compelling review of the ingenious ways that burglars negotiate the built environment—and what we can learn from their infrastructural ingenuity.

__WIRED: Anyone familiar with __BLDGBLOG understands why you would write a book about cities. But what made you want to write about burglary?

Manaugh: One thing that really interests me about burglary is that it’s specifically an architectural crime; you can’t have burglary if you don’t have buildings. In fact, any intention to commit a crime in a building where you don’t have permission to be can be labeled burglary. So when you create a building, you also create the possibility of someone breaking into it. I wanted to explore the notion that crimes can, in a way, be hard-wired into a city, and how a city’s makeup can result in this criminality.

Another thing is that architects and urban planners have a really particular take on how cities work. But the minute you step over to examine things from a criminal perspective, you discover there’s this whole world of other people, and they also know a lot about cities and architecture— they just look at it from a totally different point of view. They see things like vulnerabilities, and blind spots, and routes into and through a building that an architect might not have thought of. Burglary felt to me like an ideal and emblematic sort of spatial crime that I could use to spin out an entire series of related stories.

Nicola Twilley

It’s hard to not look at the world differently, after reading your book. I’m now a little more paranoid about somebody breaking into my house. But on the other hand, I also feel more well equipped to prevent a break-in.

When you give people the ability to think about their own homes and their own offices from the point of view of a burglar, you’re also helping them find security. The change of perception that lets you see the world through the eyes of a burglar is the same thing that will let you secure yourself even better and more efficiently, whether it’s by plugging those holes, or locking that bathroom door, or making sure that that fire escape in the back does not, in fact, lead to a window that you never look through.

And most people have had to think like a burglar, at one point or another, right?

Totally. Say you want to get onto the roof of your apartment to look out over the city, and you need to find a way up there—through a window, maybe, or up the fire escape. The other example I use, which is a relatively universal experience, at least in Western culture, is trying to sneak out of your house at night without your parents hearing you. You’re doing exactly what a burglar does. You’re looking at your house in terms of stealth, in terms of hiding places, in terms of getting into or out of a place without the homeowners knowing that you’re there, or without them waking up. In a very literal sense, you are acting like a burglar.

And when you look at architecture from that point of view, you realize that you can re-think how to get from one room to the next, or how to get from one building to the next, and all of a sudden the entire city becomes this interesting exercise in spatial imagination.

I keep thinking about the reformed burglar from Toronto who you met in the course of your reporting—the one who, by carefully observing the placement of fire escapes, could deduce a building’s floor plan without ever stepping foot inside it.

He called himself Jack Dakswin, and he actually exploited a bunch of things relating to Toronto’s fire code. Fire escapes, sure, but also the placement and number of emergency exits on the outside of a building; the maximum allowed distance between an emergency exit and the door to an apartment; which doors on which floors were required by law to be connected to alarms; and therefore which apartments were more vulnerable to burglaries than others.

Dakswin was able to predict, from fire codes, alone, what a building might look like on the inside, how many people might live in that building, and where the doors to the apartments might be. It was a surprisingly accurate way to deduce what he was breaking into, before he had even entered the building.

It’s so easy to take for granted that people will misuse computer technology to illegally access bank accounts that aren’t theirs. It’s like hacking has become an expected byproduct of the world that we’ve constructed.

But to take something that’s existed for 150 years, like a centralized fire code for an entire city, and to suddenly realize that it can be used for something unexpected and illegal? It shifts your perspective in a really strange way. You realize this thing has been hiding in plain sight this entire time. All it takes is one person to come along and show the criminal possibilities hidden in the built environment.

Was there a portion of the book that you enjoyed researching the most?

Nicola Twilley

One of the most important moments was meeting Karl Alizade, who designs panic rooms. That was when I realized the ethical stakes of burglary are much higher, even, than I had anticipated. And I feel like he offered, under the guise of technical innovation, a really strong moral orientation for understanding burglary as a crime of violation, and humiliation, even. And I feel like he provided a nice turning point for me, to realize that my gut instinct was actually correct— that the more I was learning about this stuff, the less heroic burglars seemed to be.

Alizade is the one who compares the psychological impact of burglary to that of rape, right?

__ __Yeah, that’s him, and it was great to get that perspective. But it was also really interesting to see how, sometimes, to implement a moral code, you have to back it up with incredible acts of engineering. [Alizade’s] panic rooms are that kind of undertaking. And you can obviously misuse his panic rooms—like, if you buy a panic room and install it in your home, and you’re a drug lord, you’re going to make it almost impossible for SWAT teams to get in and capture you. But at the same time, I thought it was really interesting that he puts his engineering where his mouth is, if you’ll excuse the phrase, and, you know, backed up his beliefs with his work.

You spent some time researching whether recreational lock-picking is a gateway drug for burglary, and you learned that it really isn’t. In fact, the cops and other experts that you spoke to were pretty clear about that point: most burglars just don’t pick locks.

When we talk about burglary, we’re talking about breaking into an architectural structure, and in many cases that involves a very creative use—or misuse—of architecture, because it means breaking down a wall, or cutting a hole through a roof, or knocking a door off its hinges—that kind of thing. And if that’s what you’re talking about, it turns out there’s this whole other world of super tools that are used and specifically designed with that kind of utility in mind.

Like, you can use a repurposed airbag to blow a door off its hinges. Or get your hands on a drilling template that’ll show you where and how deep to drill through a safe to force it open.

Exactly. There are also forced entry and breaching tools, and they’re usually controlled by military, law enforcement, and fire departments. ATF agents and SWAT teams have access to tools that are truly premised on the notion of breaking into buildings. The ultimately burglary crew, then, in some ways, is a combination of emergency first responder teams and fire department personnel, and the tools that they have are really interesting. They have everyday access to demolition equipment. And when you start looking at it like that, you get a really interesting take on what those people are doing and what their relationship is to architecture, as well.

Of the forced entry tools that you talk about, my favorite is definitely the thermic lance.

__ __Oh yeah, I love that thing. It’s also known as a burning bar.

And remind me how that thing works? You run oxygen through it, right?

__ __Basically, it’s a bundle of steel rods inside another steel sleeve, but then you run oxygen through it at high pressure. When you light the steel at one end, the oxygen inside catches fire and the internal rods start to melt. The result is a 6-foot rod full of high-pressure, burning oxygen and melted steel. You can push this thing forward into basically anything and it’ll melt right through it. You can melt into bank vaults, you can melt through solid granite, you can take apart railroad tracks. It’s an amazing, and kind of terrifying, tool.

Its original purpose was for demolition. It was meant to take apart war materiel on the battlefield. And then, lo and behold, a criminal comes along and realizes, my god, this is the ideal tool for melting my way into a bank vault. And you know, I think it’s that kind of ingenuity, the creative misuse of technology, that underpins so much of not only the conversation about burglary, but the conversation about any act of criminality.

Reading about the ingenuity that burglars bring to their crimes is one of the most engaging things about this book. I was really impressed by the tunneling crew that exploited L.A.’s underground infrastructure.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Yeah, they’re called the Hole in the Ground Gang. The name was given to them after the fact; it wasn’t a self-chosen calling card. They were behind a still-unsolved crime from the 1980s, and it’s incredible, actually. Not only because so few people seem to know about it, but also because it’s jaw-dropping how technical it was, as an undertaking. The crew was able to tunnel into a bank near the Sunset Strip over the course of several weeks, by exploiting the sewer system and emergency storm-overflow tunnels that come down out of the Hollywood Hills and wind beneath the city.

And what’s really amazing about it is not only how well they knew the city’s sewer system, but how intimately they knew the natural topography of the region. The routes they took used to be streams that flowed out of nearby canyons; but they’d long since been paved over and turned into storm overflow sewers. In the end, the burglars took their knowledge of infrastructure and their knowledge of the natural landscape and combined it with their tunneling skills—all to break into a bank. I mean the whole thing is really mind-boggling, the level of dedication it took for them to pull it off. Add to that the fact that they were never caught, and the whole thing is just extraordinary.

You know what I loved most about that heist? The way the burglars got rid of the dirt. Every night, before they started tunneling, they built a little dam. And every morning, they would break the dam to wash away the earth they’d excavated overnight. They used this technique to get rid of thousands of cubic feet of dirt. I mean, what an elegant solution.

Yeah, it’s really incredible, and again, it's the kind of thing that I think really distinguishes burglary from something like hacking. What’s fascinating about burglary is not that it results in people taking things from others. My interest is not in understanding how we can screw over other people by stealing what they own. My interest is, specifically, in how burglary re-thinks the architectural environment in a way that you can’t really get away with from a civilian or law-abiding point of view. The notion that you can just hack into somebody’s bank account and take a bunch of money doesn’t have that brute-force, hands-on, lo-fi, physical relationship to the city that I find so interesting.